The present invention relates to a droplet discharging apparatus for discharging droplets at an object. More particularly, the invention relates to: a head unit having a discharge head capable of discharging droplets through a single discharge port at a plurality of pixel areas in deflected fashion; a droplet discharging apparatus equipped with that discharge head; an information processing apparatus capable of communicating adaptively with that droplet discharging apparatus; methods and programs for providing notification and updating status information and for being executed by that droplet discharging apparatus; an information processing apparatus for verifying and updating status information about that droplet discharging apparatus; methods and programs for processing information, detecting faulty positions, and updating status information and for being executed by that information processing apparatus; and a droplet discharging system made up of that droplet discharging apparatus and that information processing apparatus.
Ink discharge type printers have gained widespread use today. Depending on their use status, these printers can sometimes experience cases of degradation in performance. Notable cases of such degradation include faulty discharges due to clogged discharge ports (i.e., nozzles) or nozzles that have become defective.
Depending on its cause, a faulty function could be repaired theoretically by printer designers modifying relevant settings on the head unit of the affected printer. The hypothetical dispatch of a printer designer to the locale of the printer in question, however, is obviously unrealistic from a cost effectiveness point of view. In practice, service personnel having received technical information from manufacturers or venders are dispatched to repair failed equipment.
Repairs of some defects are difficult to accomplish except by those well-versed in the printer design. Manufacturers and venders have been slow to implement arrangements affording service personnel in the field sufficient means and expertise to isolate and deal with problems in diverse degrees of severity with ease, including the difficult cases.
Meanwhile, most printers are furnished with features allowing end users having noticed poor print quality to perform simple maintenance work and to check the remaining amount of ink for replenishment.
The users carry out their maintenance work typically by checking an indicator on the printer body or a display screen of an external computer connected with the printer being serviced. The servicing work illustratively includes head cleaning, gap control, and color correction.
Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2001-7969 discloses techniques for causing an image reading apparatus (i.e., scanner) mounted on a printer to read the result of print and for diagnosing the operating status of the printer based on the read data.
Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2001-7969 further discloses techniques for allowing or prompting the user to perform maintenance work based on the result of such diagnosis. The disclosed techniques are intended to eliminate the end user's subjective—and often erroneous—assessment of printer failures with a view to ensuring stable print quality.
However, the information provided within the framework of conventional technical assistance is mostly limited to basic settings (e.g., version information about a driver) of the printer, indications for urging the user to clean the printer head, and some supplementary knowledge about the printer innards that cannot be appraised from the outside.
In other words, end users are offered no detailed status information about the ink discharge section and other key parts of the printer or about their soiled conditions. At present, only service personnel and engineers involved in printer development have access to such information through the use of specialized analytic tools.
It follows that the user, having failed to restore normal printing through head cleaning, typically needs to let service personnel or specialists in printer development take care of the repairs without knowing what is actually wrong with the equipment. Such repairs mostly take place with the users bringing their faulty printers to service centers or having service personnel come over to their place for repair work.
In the meantime, the number of the above-mentioned analytic tools deployed in the field is generally small. Given their limited resources, service personnel are often forced to roughly isolate what appears to be the trouble with the printer, before replacing an entire unit containing the apparently isolated fault. As a result, the repair tends to cost more and take longer than is acceptable to many end users.